Castile’s fiancée calls into service honoring slain Dallas cops

“It's gonna be OK.”
The Minnesota woman who broadcast her fiancé’s final breaths after he was shot by a cop said Sunday her 4-year-old daughter keeps echoing that phrase.
The message of hope by Diamond Reynolds came during a phone call into a town hall-style, three-hour Sunday service at The Potter’s House, a predominantly black Dallas megachurch.
The video of her fiancé, Philando Castile, 32, dying behind the wheel of his car after being shot multiple times by a St. Anthony police officer, featured the 4-year-old Dae’Anna reassuring Reynolds.
“It’s OK Mommy,” she said from the backseat. “I’m right here with you.”
Five days after the shooting, the child is still telling her mother that same heartbreaking message, Reynolds said through tears.
“My daughter is an angel. She’s definitely more stronger than I am. It’s only because of him. I believe (Castile) is inside of her,” Reynolds said, her voice cracking.
“She hasn’t cried or anything. She just talks all positivity and keeps telling me. ‘It’s gonna be OK.’”
Her outrage, however, remained fierce as she spoke to around 10,000 parishioners inside the church — including Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, Police Chief David Brown and at least one cop who survived Micah Johnson’s Thursday night assault that left five Dallas cops dead.
“To get it on camera, the immediate aftermath, was not for anything other than to be heard for justice,” Reynolds said. “Because at the end of the day, the people that are here to serve and protect us, we call upon them when we are in need, but when the officers are the ones that are hurting us, who do we call?”
The tough, honest dialogue came as President Obama and many others have called for healing between law enforcement and the black community.
Obama will travel to Dallas Tuesday and address an interfaith memorial service, the White House said on Sunday.
The nation’s traumatic week began with Alton Sterling being shot by cops who had pinned him down outside a Baton Rouge convenience store Tuesday evening.
Sterling’s aunt, who raised the 37-year-old man who was selling CDs before being killed, traveled to Dallas after learning Johnson had launched his attack on cops in response to the shootings of Sterling and Castile.
“I saw what happened here, I just had to come,” Saundra Sterling told The Dallas Morning News. “Let them know — we don’t promote violence.”
Reynolds and Sterling, still grieving over the police shootings separated by over 1,000 miles, now felt they had larger roles to play as a traumatized country grappled with how to restore trust with police officers.
“It instantly clicked to me that this was something bigger than myself and Phil,” Reynolds told the crowd.
The pastor of the church, Bishop T.D. Jakes, preached dialogue and empathy. He disputed the notion that “if you’re concerned about police brutality, you feel that way to the exclusion of appreciation of the good police officers who serve us every day,” according to the Dallas Morning News.
“I don’t want to be on this side or that side. I just want to stand for what is right,” he added.
In another heartbreaking moment, Jakes hugged a weeping Officer Steve Gentry, who saw his friend dead following Johnson’s barrage of bullets directed at cops supervising a protest through downtown Dallas against police violence.
“There’s been a lot of blame on both sides. It disturbs me. It keeps me up at night,” Gentry said.
Johnson was killed by police who deployed a robot carrying a bomb.
“We need more applicants to the police force. We need more support from our community,” Justin Brandt of the Dallas Police recruiting unit told the crowd.
Across the Dallas-Fort Worth area, meanwhile, other churches held services honoring the five slain officers.

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